I would not pay any premium for a company that has only a small entry barrier for new competitors. And if they continue to top-list the companies that pay most for their search-place there will be another google coming that delivers better and more realistic search results and it will take only some month to 1/4 the share price. You can ride it as long as it runs, but if it comes to value investing its not the right stock to own. Comparing it to the MSFT is not possible. But right now its really a perfect stock to daytrade, I like it. And it will be a wild ride down if it starts to fall, just look at the low short interest and imagine all the sell stops that are carried behind and you can think that this thing will collapse once gravity wins.
Google says their motto is Do No Evil, sounds like a smokescreen to me. Information is power, and we know that power corrupts many people. And those kind of people seek positions where they can have power. Wait until the govt. takes control of the internet (See: China's national firewall), to protect against "terrorist" threats. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Google's Secret Plans For All That Dark Fiber? Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday November 20, @12:14PM from the com'on-just-tell-me-do-it dept. beat.net writes "Robert X. Cringely details the plan for all the dark fiber Google has been buying up: "The probable answer lies in one of Google's underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn't just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid. While Google could put these containers anywhere, it makes the most sense to place them at Internet peering points, of which there are about 300 worldwide."" http://slashdot.org/articles/05/11/20/1514244.shtml?tid=217
Forget the price of GOOG for a minute and think of it as a $40.00 stock with 10x the shares available. So it has gone from "$8.50" to "$40.00" in more than 1 year, very common. Now its on its way to "$45.00" and then "$50.00", also very common for stocks to do.
Although it is about to correct short term, imo in the longer run GOOG is actually undervalued. It plans to monetize every nook and cranny of the future ie internet and commerce done on the internet. At the moment the current internet is about 10% of where it will eventually scale up to. The biggest hurdle preventing another explosive spurt is the need for expensive licensed software to plug into the net and the relatively high cost of bandwidth in most of the under-developed world. another common statement that is in actuality patently false. The entry to barrier is actually very high and climbing by the day. Ask MSFT, they know. Even after a concerted push and billions spent, their new search capability is inferior to GOOG's. Not only does GOOG have a superb technological lead, it's sucking up all the greatest computing brains around. Again you can ask MSFT, they know interesting link http://www.kottke.org/04/04/google-operating-system
GOOG Google faces stiffer competition as online advertising goes glitzy - Barron's (400.21 ) Barron's notes that Google, with a market value of $119 billion, should soon surpass Yahoo! (YHOO) as the biggest online-ad seller. But Google could be hard pressed to sustain its enormous momentum as Web advertising goes mainstream and rivals encroach on its paid-search turf. Competitors like Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! and even Google's partner, the America Online unit of Time Warner (TWX), which all have trailed in paid search, may turn out to be big winners as major advertisers move toward glitzy online branding campaigns. Take the splashy ads Ford ran two years ago to kick off the NFL season: To promote its F-150 truck, the car maker bought spots on all the major sites, a "home-page takeover," as it's known in the business, and used software that grabbed the entire computer-screen image and shook it, says Greg Stuart, chief executive of the Internet Advertising Bureau. "It was very powerful," says Stuart. "When you throw in sound, people would think there was an earthquake."
I drop mapquest and use maps.google instead, I also can get bird eye view of my house using earth.google... it is not a small entry barrier competitors worry about, it is multiple innovative quality entry barriers they have to jump.
oh how often have we heard this bevore... Yahoo was also THE search engine and then came google. Another google will come and another... By the way, how much do you pay to GOOG for using google earth ? If you read about google in internet or newsforums, there is hardly nothing they don't have in pipeline according to them. From some mysterious super computers that can be dumped by airplane or some internetshops that will trash ebay and amazon within some months... Hmm, I did not read that they want to be enganged in health care or building cars but that is only a matter of time. We are in a big hype about google impressed by media and a ton of people who profit from a high GOOG share price, especially at year end, face it. But shorting calls in this momentum would be the last thing I would do, only fools think this is a safe deal. Imagine what happens if they come out with a stock split, and believe me its only a matter of weeks before they will to make final ignition to the stock price.
Closed all positions for ~$100/contract group loss, and opened the same position with all strikes bumped up $10 with the short straddle at $410 now...p/l about the same...